The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for generating telephone dialing signals. More particularly the invention relates to providing an alphabetic keyboard device for use with a telephone dialing circuit.
Telephone dialing is typically effected numerically through the assignment of individualized telephone numbers. Historically, however, the digits 2-9 have been assigned three (3 ) alphabetic letters allowing alphanumeric designations. The standard 12-key telephone keypad provides the following alphabetic representations for the numeric keys.
______________________________________ 1 - 2 - ABC 3 - DEF 4 - GHI 5 - JKL 6 - MNO 7 - PRS 8 - TUV 9 - WXY * - 0 - # ______________________________________
Often letters and words have been used to identify telephone numbers. Advantageously, this is done to make telephone numbers easy to memorize and for marketing purposes. Also, with greater business usage of wide-area telecommunications services (WATS), more and more businesses have been creative in the selection of their telephone numbers. Numerous examples of alphabetically represented telephone numbers exist, some of which include: 1-800-FLOWERS, 1-800-DOCTORS, 1-800-COLLECT, 1-800-OPERATOR. Further examples may be found for non-WATS telephone service as well. Moreover, many automated telephone answering and messaging systems such as voice mail services and stock quote services utilize alpha-numeric key entry for selecting service options and for identifying, e.g., persons or securities, etc.
A problem exists in that the logical mapping of alphabetic numbers to a numeric telephone number sequence is not natural and often makes tedious the otherwise simple operation of dialing a telephone, not withstanding the ease of memorizing the alphabetic representations. Furthermore, the user's translation or mapping of alphabetic representations to numeric telephone numbers often results in misdialing.
It would be desirable therefore to provide an alphabetic keypad for use with a telephone which simplifies translation of alphabetic telephone number representations or actually makes it unnecessary for the user to undertake such translation prior to dialing the telephone.